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You Think You Know Me?

I'm a mid-thirties, married gamer, living on Long Island. Having recently moved from Virginia I am currently only employed part-time so I have a lot of free time on my hands. So I started this blog. Sit back, enjoy a glass of box wine, and witness the musings of what happens to a gamer when he decides to put the sticks down every once in a while.

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Gaming

I recently downloaded Hitman: Absolution over Xbox Live (if you’re unfamiliar with the ‘Games With Gold’ program I highly recommend you check it out) and I absolutely love this game. I haven’t played a Hitman game since the PlayStation 2, so I’m a little rusty on the overarching storyline, but I know enough to jump right in.

The player plays as Agent 47, a hit man in the International Contract Agency (ICA). As the game starts 47 is given a contract to take out his previous handler, Diana Burnwood, whom he trusted, before she went rogue. Diana kidnapped a valuable asset to the company: a teenage girl named Victoria. Agent 47 infiltrates Diana’s mansion and eventually finds Diana and wounds her mortally, but before she dies she entrusts the care of Victoria to Agent 47 and gives him an envelope to read with more information.

This is where knowing the whole backstory of Agent 47 would come in handy, but the game does a decent job of bringing new players to the series up to speed. From my very limited understanding of the games, Agent 47 was basically raised by the ICA to be a silent killing machine, along with many other Agents, to do their bidding around the world. Now he wants revenge or salvation or maybe absolution. But I digress.

What I enjoy about this game is that I can play each stage however I feel. If I want to be super sneaky and not kill anybody but my targets, I can. If I choose to go in guns blazing, killing everything that move, I can. If I want a hybrid run-and-gun now, then hide in this closet until everybody’s chill, I can play it that way. Different ways present different challenges to the player, but I can play the game however I want. I am not forced into some stealthy section of a shooter, nor am I forced to shoot my way out of every situation I get Agent 47 into.

Because of this freedom I try to play the game true to myself. If I were to be a super killing machine that infiltrates heavily guarded areas to take down high priority targets with no one being the wiser, I would do so with little or no collateral damage. No innocent deaths or casualties. Period. This even goes for the lackeys that don’t know any better. It’s not their fault they end up working for an evil corporation while trying to put bread on the table and a roof over their families’ heads. So I restart levels an indefinite amount of times until I get through with only killing the assigned target.

All of that honor among thieves crap went right out the window when I got to the orphanage level. To sum it up, a sadistic villain found out where Agent 47 stashed Victoria and plans on kidnapping her for ransom. Luckily Agent 47 arrives before they find her. Unfortunately, the staff, made up of brothers and sisters of the cloth, isn’t so lucky. As Agent 47 carries Veronica to safety, albeit very short lived, he sees priests and nuns that were gunned down and slaughtered. Innocent casualties in the gangs attempt to find Veronica.

I know that Agent 47 is a silent assassin, but I could not let these egregious crimes go unpunished. I killed every last goon in that orphanage. I used my fiber wire to garrote as many as I could before being spotted, then I opened up with my dual SMGs and Mossberg shotgun. When their backup arrived they received the same righteous punishment as their compatriots. It was a bloodbath. When I, ahem, Agent 47 was finished, he looked upon the blood stained walls and the dead bodies of the wicked, and saw that it was good.

Not many games garner this kind of reaction out of me. Dishonored was one (I did the same thing after Corvo was betrayed by the people he was working with). When I play in character, I stay in character. That makes the game even more fun for me, when I don the mantle, I become Agent 47. I believe that Agent 47 would do the same.